news
Programming Leftovers
-
Protesilaos Stavrou ☛ Emacs: completion-preview-mode and the Completions buffer (Emacs 31)
The built-in completion-preview-mode lets us expand what we type in a minimalist, distraction-free way. It can also be combined with the default Completions buffer to show all the available options. The Completions buffer has several nice features, starting with Emacs 31, which make this an excellent combination that does not require any third party packages (though packages can still augment the overall experience). I also mention the Emacs 31 ‘newcomers-presets’ theme, which configures some of these options as well: it is a great way to start your Emacs configuration.
-
Rachel Kaufman ☛ User Testing on a Shoestring
The industry leaders, Nielsen Norman Group, define user testing this way:
"In a usability-testing session, a researcher (called a “facilitator” or a “moderator”) asks a participant to perform tasks, usually using one or more specific user interfaces. While the participant completes each task, the researcher observes the participant’s behavior and listens for feedback."
My lazy definition is:
"Putting your app in front of people because you can’t learn how people use it unless you watch them"
(replace “app” with “website,” “product”, whatever.)
-
Python
-
Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Z is for zip file mocking - Python A to Z
I initially considered writing about zip but I already wrote about zip in Batteries included two years ago and I don’t have anything new to say about it.
A while ago in a project, I had to test a function that downloaded a zip file, read an XML file from it and returned some value. I needed to figure out a way to mock an HTTP GET request to return a zip file.
-
-
Java/Golang
-
Daniel Lemire ☛ The new Go JSON API: twice as fast, or 1.5x slower?
Go 1.27 makes a new JSON package (encoding/json/v2) available by default in its standard library. The two APIs look almost the same: [...]
-